[Dixielandjazz] Farewell to Two Jazz Giants: Jon Hendricks and George Avakian

[Robert Ringwald]

Farewell to Two Jazz Giants: Jon Hendricks and George AvakianFarewell to Two
Jazz Giants: Jon Hendricks and George Avakian

by Howard Reich

Chicago Tribune, November 27, 2017


A sizable chunk of jazz history left us last week, with the deaths of two
irreplaceable nonagenarians: groundbreaking singer Jon Hendricks and
pioneering record executive George Avakian.


For each not only extended the breadth of what we hear but deepened our
understanding of it.


Hendricks, who died Nov. 22 in Manhattan at 96, was not the first male
singer to apply the wizardry of instrumental improvisation to the vocalist’s
art. He freely acknowledged the influence of Eddie Jefferson and King
Pleasure, who forged the art of vocalese -- applying lyrics to the notes of
instrumental solos. And, of course, Louis Armstrong in the 1920s taught the
world that the human voice could invent highflying, wordless lines dubbed
“scat singing.”


But Hendricks took vocalese and scat further -- technically and
aesthetically -- than other male singers.


“I heard King Pleasure’s vocalese version of ‘Moody’s Mood for Love,’ and I
said, ‘Wow, doggone, you can actually do that,’” Hendricks told me in 1994.
He was referencing King Pleasure’s 1952 recording, in which the singer
delivered Jefferson’s original lyrics to James Moody’s 1949 tenor saxophone
solo on “I’m In the Mood for Love.”


Though Hendricks was generous in crediting his vocal forebears, he was
experimenting back in his youth, especially in the company of the man who
would emerge as greatest pianist in jazz history, Art Tatum. A dozen years
older than Hendricks, Tatum was based in the same town, Toledo, Ohio, and
“lived five houses from us up the street,” Hendricks said in our interview.
“I started to work with him in a Toledo club when I was in junior high
school.... Because of my association with Tatum, I had the roots of bebop
firmly implanted in my psyche. I was scatting bebop when I was 15 and 16.”


Or at least the roots of what eventually would be called bebop, a music of
complex harmonic structures, fast-moving chord progressions and high-speed
melodic figurations. Just as Tatum was applying these methods to the
keyboard and Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to the alto saxophone and
trumpet, respectively, Hendricks ventured to explore whether the male voice
could do the same.


“I met Bird when he came to the Civic Auditorium (in Toledo), which is a
big, barnlike hall,” Hendricks told me. “They were doing ‘The Song Is You,’
and after he started playing I came on stage, and I scatted I don’t know how
many choruses, because my knees were shaking.


“And then I wanted to get the hell out of there, so I started off the
bandstand, and Bird grabbed my coattails. He motioned for me to come over,
and this is in the middle of all the music going on.


“I looked at the band, and they all had these mad eyes, because everybody
was shooting stuff (drugs), and everybody looked very, very wild to me -- I
was still a conservative law student at the time. So I went over and down
and we had this lightning bandstand talk.”


Parker suggested that Hendricks drop his law studies and come to New York to
pursue jazz, which the singer did in 1952.


“There was no money, no work, there was only the music,” Hendricks told me.
“The music was sustaining everybody. Everybody was getting together and
jamming and playing the music. Everybody was in on the creation.”


>From this creative cauldron came Hendricks’ vocalese version of Woody Herman’s
recording of “Four Brothers,” which Hendricks made with singer Dave Lambert
in 1957. The two soon teamed with Annie Ross to release “Sing a Song of
Basie” in ’58, thereby launching a stellar vocal trio.


“I wasn’t surprised that Lambert, Hendricks & Ross became such a hit,” said
Hendricks, the trio releasing three stunning albums on Columbia, all pushing
forward the art of jazz singing.


Unfortunately, the ensemble broke up after four years, but Hendricks never
stopped inventing.


In 1997 he showed lightning virtuosity in the Chicago premiere of Wynton
Marsalis’ epic “Blood on the Fields,” which would win the Pulitzer Prize in
music that year (I served on the jury that recommended it). And in 2005, at
age 83, Hendricks shared the stage of Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park
with vocalists Mark Murphy, Sheila Jordan and Kurt Elling, “tearing through
up-tempo repertoire and caressing ballads with the chops of a man many years
younger,” as I wrote in my review.


It so happens that the long-playing recordings that propelled Lambert,
Hendricks & Ross were made possible, in part, by Avakian, who also died Nov.
22 in Manhattan, at 98. In 1948, as a Columbia Records executive, Avakian
oversaw the the release of the first pop and jazz LPs. Even before then,
though, Avakian made history -- and sharpened our comprehension of it -- by
producing “Chicago Jazz” for Decca Records. The 1940 collection of 78-rpm
recordings documented the work of Eddie Condon, Jimmy McPartland and other
celebrated Chicagoans, constituting the first time jazz was presented in
album rather than singles form.


Whenever I would write a major piece on jazz progenitors Jelly Roll Morton
or Louis Armstrong, Avakian would phone to discuss these masters and to
enlighten me. It was quite something to hear his discourses, and all the
more remarkable considering the insights were coming from a man born in
Armavir, Russia, to Armenian parents in 1919 (the family came to America
soon after).


Avakian’s connection to early jazz made him a natural to appear on ABC-TV’s
“Nightline” in 2001, when the show did a program based on my Tribune
articles on Armstrong’s hitherto unheard diary recordings. Avakian had
witnessed Armstrong’s volatile reaction when the federal government wasn’t
enforcing desegregation in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 (the trumpeter
canceled his State Department-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union).


“Louis just blew his top,” Avakian said on a “Nightline” program that quoted
both of us. “You know, he’s the only person who really spoke out that
strongly, and yet there were people calling him an Uncle Tom, even black
people were calling him an Uncle Tom. What they didn’t know was that Louis
on the inside was much more than the cheerful, smiling entertainer.”


Ultimately, Avakian and Hendricks devoted their lives to spreading the
gospel of jazz. For their achievements, each was awarded this country’s
highest jazz honor, a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters
Fellowship.


“All of the seminal rock artists -- the Beatles, the Rolling Stones -- were
all jazz fans,” Hendricks told me. “I think they realized that jazz is the
basis of the whole musical structure of the United States.”

  Few did more to make that case than Hendricks and Avakian. -30




Bob Ringwald piano, Solo, Duo, Trio, Quartet, Quintet
Fulton Street Jazz Band (Dixieland/Swing)
916/ 806-9551
Check out my performing schedule: www.ringwald.com/schedule.php
Amateur (ham) Radio Station K6YBV

“If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed,
if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.” -- Mark Twain 


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